Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Transylvania Blues

In the year leading up to her death, Betty Gail made regular entries into her diary —often in shorthand, which made them difficult for investigators to decipher.

The first entry Betty Gail wrote while a student at Transylvania University was by far the most in-depth and intimate of those included in the police file.

The Oct. 1, 1960 entry was found by investigators on the pages of an old notebook. The page-long entry details an encounter with a fellow Transylvania student, Richard Berman.

“My 1st college entry,” Betty Gail wrote. “Rick Berman came over to me at the dance tonight. We talked and joked like always, but I knew something was wrong.”

Berman said he wanted to have a serious talk.

“He told me that he thought too much of me, and respected me too much to try to take advantage of me,” she wrote.

The diary entry does not explain what happened between the two students to warrant the talk, but Betty Gail’s words make it out to be something serious.

“He said that he laid awake last night thinking and he had to tell me, though he would not have told any other girl,” she wrote.

Betty Gail was speechless at Berman’s words, “and that is something,” she wrote.

“It will be hard now for me to date other boys,” she continued. “They probably won’t even ask me for a date because of Rick.”

Why she thought that was not explained in the diary entry.

Berman, now a high-powered, well-known figure in Washington D.C. and president of public affairs firm Berman and Company, declined to be interviewed for this story. His spokeswoman did relay in an email that, “he remembers Betty as a very nice girl, but that it was such a long time ago that he remembers very little more than that.”

The Lexington Police Department’s Cold Case Unit works to investigate serious crimes that remain unsolved. Many of the cases are homicides, but all leave victims without justice — sometimes decades have passed since the crime was committed. These stories are part of an ongoing series on unsolved crimes in Lexington. Anyone with information about any of the cases is encouraged to contact the Lexington Police Department at 859-258-3700.

Nineteen-year-old Betty Gail Brown didn’t believe in the death penalty.

In an essay she wrote while a student at Transylvania University in Lexington, Brown stated: “When a man commits a crime, he no longer has the right to liberty, but his right of life should never be taken away from him.”

Her belief that criminals, even murderers, should be shown compassion and allowed to become productive members of society was simply stated in her essay. One may wonder, though, if Betty Gail’s stance would still apply to the person who murdered her in the early hours of Oct. 27, 1961.

A well-liked sophomore at Transylvania, Betty Gail’s murder is one of the most infamous in Lexington’s recent history — she was found in her car, strangled to death with her own brassiere.

Some would say her death was the wake-up call to residents that Lexington wasn’t just a little town anymore. People have said, “that case became the reason that my family started to lock our doors,” said Lexington Police Department Detective Rob Wilson.

Unsolved for more than 50 years, Betty Gail’s murder is still being investigated by the LPD, but as time passes leads become harder to find.

Betty Gail’s last day

It was nearly 3 a.m. when Betty Gail’s father, Hargus Brown, called police because his daughter hadn’t made it home from a biology study group that ended at midnight.

She had been at Forrer Hall since about 7:15 p.m. that night studying with three other Transylvania students. All three students and the Forrer Hall housemother saw Betty Gail walking to her car, a 1959 blue Simca, when she left the group.

The last person to admit seeing Betty Gail alive was Charles Risdon, another Transylvania student who had just dropped a date off at Forrer Hall.

His car was parked about 30 feet behind Betty Gail’s and he pulled up next to her and chatted for a moment, according to information from LPD.

“(Risdon) states he asked her how she was feeling, (he) did this because he states he has a dancing class with her and she didn’t seem to be feeling her best during the class,” a police report said.

The two rolled up their respective windows and Risdon drove away, with Betty Gail following close behind him until he pulled into the parking lot behind Hazelrigg Hall, midway between Fourth and Third streets. Betty Gail continued down Upper Street. It was 12:05 a.m.

By 1:30 a.m., Betty Gail was dead.

She was found in her car, which was parked in front of Morrison Chapel on the Transylvania Campus at 3:05 a.m. Officer Don Duckworth with LPD was checking campus locations after an “all unit” broadcast was made to officers on duty about the missing co-ed.

“Officer Duckworth noticed the victim seated under the driver’s seat, head back, (she) appeared to be dead,” a police report said. “(He) immediately took the necessary measures to protect the scene and radioed for assistance.”

Duckworth told investigators that no one touched the car until his backup arrived.

Betty Gail was wearing the clothes she left her parents’ house in — a white blouse, Bermuda shorts, a sweater and beige raincoat. But when she was found, her blouse was unbuttoned, but still tucked in, and her brassiere was around her neck.

“An autopsy determined Brown had died as a result of strangulation with her own bra,” a police report said.

It was determined that robbery was not a motive in the murder, and Betty Gail had not been sexually assaulted. While she was still in the driver’s seat, her car keys were found in the floorboard of the back seat. The doors to the car were locked, except the front passenger door, which had a malfunctioning lock. Police were unable to find any witnesses to the crime.

In a summary report complete in the case when it was re-examined in 1988, a section titled “Case Problems” detailed issues that complicated investigation of Betty Gail’s murder.

“Practically every detail of the crime scene, autopsy, evidence collected, and witnesses statements were released to the media fueling theories and speculations,” the report said.

The morning newspaper from Oct. 28, 1961, ran a gruesome photo of Betty Gail’s body still in her car on the front page, “inciting public interest,” the report continued.

Male students and faculty members from Transylvania University were fingerprinted and given polygraph tests en masse, but none were ultimately considered suspects in the case.

Things turned around in January of 1965, when a man named Alex Arnold admitted to killing Betty Gail.

“On Jan. 20, 1965, Klamath Falls Ore. Police Department had arrested Arnold for public intoxication,” an LPD report said. “Arnold told an official in that city that he had murdered Brown.”

Arnold provided police officers from Lexington a handwritten statement spelling out the macabre details from the night he allegedly killed Betty Gail.

It was a cold morning in Klamath Falls, Ore. — a small town about 20 miles north of the California border — when Alex Arnold Jr. sat down with investigators from Lexington.

The officers from the Lexington Police Department traveled more than 2,300 miles because Arnold asked them to. It was Jan. 22, 1965, more than three years after the baffling murder of 19-year-old Betty Gail Brown. Investigators thought they had finally found Betty Gail’s killer in the 33-year-old Arnold.

The man said he was the one who strangled the Transylvania University co-ed in the early hours of Oct. 27, 1961. He was in the Klamath Falls Police Department, arrested on a charge of public intoxication.

The LPD investigators sat down with Arnold in the jail. They read him his rights and asked him one more time, “are you willing to make a statement and tell us all that you know about the (Betty Gail Brown) case?”

“Sure, that’s why I had you all come all the way out here,” Arnold replied.

Arnold’s story of Oct. 26, 1961, starts with a night of drinking in Lexington.

In his drunken stupor, the man was looking for a place to sleep. He first tried Gratz Park, but a couple sitting in the park made him change his mind. He crossed Third Street, walked onto the Transylvania University campus, found a place to lie down and went to sleep, according to Arnold’s statement to police.

After about an hour, he woke up from the cold and finished a bottle of wine he had with him before walking toward Short Street. That’s when he told investigators he saw Betty Gail’s car parked in front of Morrison Chapel.

Arnold told investigators he saw Betty Gail and another woman engaged sexually in the car — something the woman’s parents vehemently said was impossible.

“Upon passing a car in a driveway of the campus, I seen what looked like two women making love,” Arnold’s statement said. “They were hugging and kissing each other.”

He asked for a match from the pair as he walked by.

“They begin to cuss me,” Arnold wrote. “I said pardon me and started on for Short and Broadway.”

The pair continued to “cuss” Arnold as he walked away, and he decided to do something about it, the man’s statement said.

“Being drunk and on the spur of the moment, I got mad and turned back to the car,” he said in his statement. “Jerking the door open on the drivers’ side, I grabbed the girl on the driver’s side as she was leaning away from me.”

The other woman jumped out of the car and fled the scene, Arnold said, and he knocked Betty Gail’s head on the dashboard of the car, which “either knocked her out or she fainted.”

“Jerking her back against the seat by her hair and shoulder, I realized that she was out,” Arnold told police.

Arnold said he panicked.

He got into the back seat of the car and picked up Betty Gail’s brassiere, which he said was sitting in the front seat.

“I hung it around her neck and strangled her by putting my hands on each end of the brassiere and putting my knee against the back of the seat for leverage,” he told police. “I held it there for about a minute and a half.

“The only thing that she did was just quiver a little bit.”

Putting the brassiere on the front seat — a detail that didn’t match the initial police report that said Betty Gail was found with it still around her neck — Arnold said he noticed the woman’s blouse was tucked in but unbuttoned all the way. He said he climbed into the front seat to button it up.

“Because I thought if she was found that way (with her blouse unbuttoned) they would think I had tried to rape her, thinking for sure I would be caught,” Arnold told police.

He wiped his fingerprints off the dashboard, locked three of the car’s doors and left. Arnold told investigators that he went to the apartment of a woman named Mae Hedges.

“We had a drink of whiskey,” he said. “I told her I had just killed a woman.”

According to a statement from Hedges in court files from Arnold’s murder trial, she said the man did not come to her apartment that night.

The trial

Arnold’s murder trial started on Feb. 5, 1965, in Lexington.

Defended by attorney Amos Eblen, Arnold recanted his admission during the trial.

“His defense was that he was suffering from delirium at the time of the confession due to alcoholism and that he had thought about the murder so much he began to think he was responsible,” LPD files said.

Arnold also had an alibi from his aunt who said he was at her house at the time of the murder.

During the trial LPD Detective Capt. Gilbert Cravens testified that he issued the warrant for Arnold’s arrest on the murder charge. When asked what led to the issuance of the warrant, Cravens told the court that Arnold had confessed to the crime and “he mentioned certain things that no one would have known except someone that was there,” court files said.

It was a cold morning, so cold that frost had formed on Betty Gail’s car — a detail that would corroborate Arnold’s assertion that the cold had woken him up after falling asleep in shrubbery nearby.

Another witness, officer Don Duckworth — the officer who found Betty Gail dead in her vehicle the night of her death — testified that when he found the woman the first thing he did was call for backup. He also said he observed a wound on Betty Gail’s forehead and blood on the dashboard, which matched Arnold’s story in his confession about knocking the woman out.

In contrast to Arnold’s assertion that he put the brassiere on the front seat, Duckworth testified that Betty Gail’s brassiere was still wrapped around her neck and a piece of it had been torn off and was in her lap. He also testified that while Betty Gail’s blouse was partially buttoned, the top two buttons were still open.

Fayette County Coroner Chester Hager also testified in the case, saying he arrived at the scene of the murder at 3:40 a.m. Betty Gail was dead when he arrived.

Hager testified that the brassiere was still around Betty Gail’s neck when he initially examined her body. Along with the strangulation marks around the woman’s neck, Hager testified that it appeared Betty Gail’s head had been knocked against the dashboard so forcefully that a letter from a “Simca” decal on it was imprinted on her forehead.

Betty Gail’s scalp was torn from where someone jerked her head back by her hair, Hager said. There were no skin particles under Betty Gail’s fingernails and other than a broken fingernail on one hand, there were no defensive wounds on the woman, he said.

Lt. A.M. Carter with the LPD testified that he was one of the investigators who visited Arnold in the Klamath Falls jail. The first interview on Jan. 20 took about an hour-and-a-half, and Carter said Arnold was visibly upset.

“He was noticeably trembling,” Carter said. “He seemed to be easy to perspire; very nervous.”

Officers didn’t take a written statement from Arnold at that time. The next morning detectives met with Arnold again, this time for about two hours and at that time Arnold “was visibly calmer,” Carter testified.

“I asked him at that time if he felt any better after having disclosed his part in this thing and he said that he ‘felt like a 500-pound weight had been lifted off both shoulders,’” Carter said.

Officers did not take Arnold’s written confession until the next day, at which time the man was “calmer than the day before.” Carter told the court that Arnold was read his rights before each meeting in the Klamath Falls jail.

“He advised that this thing had been bearing on his mind all these years and that he wanted to get it out of inside of him,” Carter said.

When Capt. Bryan Henry — who was in charge of fingerprints in the Betty Gail Brown case — was brought to the stand, he told the court that only three sets of identifiable fingerprints were found in the car. Those belonged to Betty Gail’s mother, father and a mechanic who had recently worked on the car.

Other than Arnold’s written statement, investigators were unable to find any other evidence that tied him to Betty Gail’s murder.

The jury in the case deliberated for six hours and 45 minutes before announcing they were hung on a 7-5 vote. Arnold was released.

The indictment remained officially open until Feb. 2, 1973; during that time Arnold could have been re-tried on the case.

In a Feb. 3, 1966 letter from Commonwealth Attorney Donald P. Moloney to LPD Chief E.C. Hale, the former explained his trepidation about retrying the case.

“I am very reluctant to cause the additional expense of the taxpayers’ money and the consumption of the valuable time of the court, the jury, the witnesses, and your department for a second trial of this case in the absence of any more evidence than I had the last time, which the jury determined was insufficient to secure conviction,” Moloney wrote.

A response to Moloney’s letter from Hale was not included in court files.

In a Jan. 19, 1973 letter, Commonwealth Attorney Patrick H. Molloy also asked if any new evidence was available in the case. James L. Shaffer, then chief of the LPD, wrote back that there was nothing new.

“We considered the task of contacting the list of witnesses used in the 1965 trial and sincerely believe their recall to be impossible,” Shaffer wrote.

“Upon reviewing the case file, I am convinced that all pertinent leads and fragments of information have been carefully investigated without additional results,” he wrote.

Because so much time had passed since the original trial, it was Shaffer’s opinion “that it would be virtually impossible to reconstruct the case for presentation to a jury.” Molloy filed a motion to dismiss the indictment against Arnold on Feb. 5, 1973.

Arnold, who had lived in Lexington since the trial, died on June 18, 1980. He was 49.

Betty Gail Brown made a habit of recording her life, almost on a daily basis. She would put pen to paper and scratch out the details of her days.

Sometimes it was something as simple as jotting down a quick note about a test she was studying for. Sometimes she would go into great detail about an encounter with friends; sometimes she would bare her soul.

They weren’t words she probably expected anyone else to see. Normally, a young woman’s diary would remain private.

But when Betty Gail was murdered in the early morning of Oct. 28, 1961, her diary was the only window into her daily life. Her words, like the whispers of a ghost, became part of the evidence investigators would study closely, looking for clues that might lead them to a resolution.

Oct. 25, 1961, three days before her murder, the 19-year-old Transylvania University student wrote about studying for a sociology test — and boy trouble, an ongoing theme in her diary entries.

“I think boys here are a mess,” she wrote that day.

There was no way she could have known the following pages of her diary would remain forever empty.

Three days later she was dead.

Betty Gail’s murderer has never been found, but the search for her killer continues, as detectives at the Lexington Police Department are still investigating the 50-year-old case.

In the year leading up to her death, Betty Gail made regular entries into her diary —often in shorthand, which made them difficult for investigators to decipher.

The first entry Betty Gail wrote while a student at Transylvania University was by far the most in-depth and intimate of those included in the police file.

The Oct. 1, 1960 entry was found by investigators on the pages of an old notebook. The page-long entry details an encounter with a fellow Transylvania student, Richard Berman.

“My 1st college entry,” Betty Gail wrote. “Rick Berman came over to me at the dance tonight. We talked and joked like always, but I knew something was wrong.”

Berman said he wanted to have a serious talk.

“He told me that he thought too much of me, and respected me too much to try to take advantage of me,” she wrote.

The diary entry does not explain what happened between the two students to warrant the talk, but Betty Gail’s words make it out to be something serious.

“He said that he laid awake last night thinking and he had to tell me, though he would not have told any other girl,” she wrote.

Betty Gail was speechless at Berman’s words, “and that is something,” she wrote.

“It will be hard now for me to date other boys,” she continued. “They probably won’t even ask me for a date because of Rick.”

Why she thought that was not explained in the diary entry.

Berman, now a high-powered, well-known figure in Washington D.C. and president of public affairs firm Berman and Company, declined to be interviewed for this story. His spokeswoman did relay in an email that, “he remembers Betty as a very nice girl, but that it was such a long time ago that he remembers very little more than that.”

Whatever the issue between the two students was, it was apparently resolved, as Berman is affectionately mentioned numerous times in her diary.

Out of context, some of the diary entries are cryptic while others are specific.

She writes about other boys, dates and getting married.

“We used the Ouija board, and it came out I was going to marry Don, have four kids, be happy, only marriage for us both and (I will) die young during fourth childbirth … big farce,” Betty Gail wrote in a Jan. 31, 1961 entry.

The boy in the entry was identified as Don Peterson. Betty Gail had gone on several dates with him but apparently the relationship didn’t work out.

“Don and I talked a few minutes today, he went home this weekend,” she wrote in a Feb. 1 entry. “I felt mad all day because of Don, but I don’t really like him.”

Don was quickly replaced by another boy named Cal, who Betty Gail “accidentally had lunch with” on Feb. 7 (they kissed on Feb. 24).

April 28: “Cal and I went to the Coronation Ball, he said he loved me and I didn’t say anything. So, I guess we won’t be dating anymore, ever.”

Betty Gail’s diary entries continue until Oct. 25, and for all the information investigators were able to glean from the writings, nothing suspicious was found.

“There is nothing in the diary that could possibly make one think any such thing could happen,” detectives wrote about Betty Gail’s death.

Modern-day investigation

It comes down to a print found in the 50-year-old case file, one that just fell out of a file folder one day, said Lexington Police Department Detective Rob Wilson.

“They think it is part of a palm print,” said Lt. James Curless of the FBI, which was sent the print in 2006.

There are suspects convicted of murders with similar details that investigators are now looking into.

“(There are) two serial killers that passed through — in and around Lexington in that time period,” said Lt. James Curless.

But the handprint is the only lead investigators have today, and it may very well be a dead end.

“It’s one thing that we can do,” Wilson said of sending the handprint to the FBI.

Some of the most useful evidence was destroyed, including the brassiere Betty Gail was strangled to death with. If that key piece of evidence was still around, it could provide important DNA evidence.

“We’ve looked for DNA; there is none,” Curless said.

Investigators from the time of Betty Gail’s death were convinced Alex Arnold Jr., was the killer, even though he his trial resulted in a hung jury.

Former Fayette Circuit Judge George Barker, who was then an assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney told investigators that “he believed Arnold was responsible for the death” even though some of the details he gave police didn’t match the crime scene.

“(Barker) recalled that the prosecution contended that Arnold had fabricated portions of his confession to justify and rationalize his actions,” case documents say.

The case, one of the most notorious in Lexington history, has not been idle over the years.

“It looked like, from the case file, at least a couple detectives from each decade picked it up,” Wilson said.

A four-volume case file, comprised of hundreds of documents, shows that investigators did everything they could to solve the case.

“Those guys worked hard,” Wilson said.

At one point, a psychic was brought in to examine the case.

Peter Hurkos, of Waukesha, Wis., told detectives on June 11, 1962 that “the reason the killing happened was because there was a discussion about making love, then a fight started. After the victim couldn’t breathe anymore, the murder was scared and ran off.”

After everything was said and done, though, the case never found a conclusion. That was something that caused Lexington residents considerable concern.

“This was what commanded the attention of the town, like the O.J. (Simpson) trial,” Wilson said. “Because it just consumed the town for so long.”

“It captured the attention of Lexington and it bothered a lot of people,” Curless said. “They wanted it solved.”

Investigators today are no different; they want to solve the case.

Results on the partial handprint are pending and police are asking anyone with information on Betty Gail Brown’s murder to contact them.

If there is new information, “we’re going to go check it out,” Wilson said.

The person who killed Betty Gail could have been anyone.

“You’ve got her strangled in her car,” Wilson said. “Could it have been done by a stranger? Yes it could.

“Could it have been done by someone known to her? Yes it could.”

Anyone with information on the case can contact Curless or Wilson at 859-258-3700.